Springfield reviving Broiler Festival

Stefan Verbano

Sunday

Jun 19, 2011 at 12:01 AM

SPRINGFIELD — The broilers are coming back.

After a 15-year hiatus, Friends of Willamalane will re-create the historic Springfield Broiler Festival — billed as “BroilerFair” — on July 17 at Island Park, as part of next month’s Springfield SummerFair.

Chicken lovers will be able to munch on a barbecued half-chicken, coleslaw, baked beans and a roll for $7 while listening to main stage entertainment by the Conjugal Visitors and Alder Street All Stars. A chicken without the trimmings will cost $6.

Organizers say they hope to serve between 1,000 and 2,000 chicken halves.

All sale proceeds collected by the group will go to parks projects and middle school sports teams.

Most of the dinner ingredients have been donated by local businesses, and Friends of Willamalane is buying the chickens at a discount from Foster Farms.

“There is not a lot of cost involved for them,” said Mike Moskovitz, the park district’s public affairs manager. “Much of what they are going to be raising is going to be profit.”

At the festival, younger poultry fans can try their hands at fishing and enter the Recycled Regatta kids’ boat race.

The original Springfield Broiler Festival was started in the summer of 1957 by B.J. Rogers, the city’s mayor at the time, along with the Springfield Jaycees, in an effort to save Oregon’s flagging broiler industry, which was losing sales to chicken farmers from Arkansas.

The first festival drew about 5,000 people who gathered to eat 2,000 chicken dinners and participate in softball games, log-rolling contests, ax throwing, greased pig chases and square dancing. In its best years, the festival drew as many as 40,000 people.

“It was primarily a giant chicken barbecue, and people came from all over Lane County,” Moskovitz said. “It was Springfield’s major event.”

The reasons for the festival’s demise after 1996 were many. One was that the festival became nomadic: From its early and most popular location in the Willamalane district complex, the festival relocated to downtown Springfield, which caused a problem with city officials leery of the festival’s beer garden and with some downtown business owners unhappy with the closure of several downtown streets to accommodate the festival.

After downtown, the festival popped up at the Red Lion Motel in the Gateway area, but that didn’t last. In 1992, unable to nail down a suitable Springfield location, the Springfield Broiler Festival was held in Eugene at the Autzen Stadium parking lot. In 1995, it was held at the Eugene Elks Lodge across Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard from Autzen. In its last appearance in 1996, it resurfaced in Springfield in an abandoned drive-in movie lot.

Other problems included a competitor: the Springfield Filbert Festival. The Jaycees complained that the new event was being given more favorable treatment by the city, a charge the city denied. In any event, the Filbert Festival ultimately took over as Springfield’s most popular summer happening.

Those and other factors led to the Broiler Festival’s biggest problem, money. The transience and the competition reduced attendance and threw the Broiler Festival into debt, estimated in 1996 at $18,000. That made vendors and others leery about doing business with the festival. And the Jaycees began to use profits from one summer to pay off bills from a previous summer.

Early in 1997, the Jaycees missed two city-imposed deadlines for submitting a site proposal and a schedule of events — and the event was retired.

Until 2011.

BroilerFair’s organizers are hoping to reclaim the event’s distinctive taste of summer, and the fond memories created for thousands of Lane County residents.

“The focus is to bring back a nostalgic event that everyone loved,” Moskovitz said. “The more we have talked about this to community organizations and groups ... they are all excited about the fact that this is coming back to Springfield after being gone for a number of years.”

For those unable to attend the festival, chicken halves can be picked up at a drive-through window at the Willamette Adult Activity Center. Friends of Willamalane are encouraging the advance purchase of the birds, which can be bought online or by calling the group’s “chicken hot line.”

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